this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
143 points (97.4% liked)

Ask Lemmy

26968 readers
761 users here now

A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions

Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]


Rules: (interactive)


1) Be nice and; have funDoxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them


2) All posts must end with a '?'This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?


3) No spamPlease do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.


4) NSFW is okay, within reasonJust remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected]. NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].


5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions. If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.


Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.

Partnered Communities:

Tech Support

No Stupid Questions

You Should Know

Reddit

Jokes

Ask Ouija


Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Loosely inspired by how much people seemed to enjoy a similar question I asked on Games about unappreciated titles. But answers don't have to be media related (they still can be though).

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Linguistics. Did you know English and Bengali are related? They share an ancestor about 5000 years ago. Russian, Latin, Farsi, and Greek, and lots more are in that family too.

Do you know what languages are not related at all, absolutely 0% aside from borrowings, even though if you know a bit about em they seem like they should be? Japanese and Korean.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

you might enjoy reading about Champollion and how he deciphered the hieroglyphic system.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The enormous differences between korean and japanese writing are interesting for someone who can read neither. Is it related to your factoid about the language's relations?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Their writing systems have their own cool histories. Japanese technically has 4 writing systems (kinda 5 if you count the original purely chinese-character based system). Korean used to have Hanja, a Chinese based system, but then some emperor just decided "nope, this sucks, I'm making a new thing", and came up with hangul. Imo hangul is one of the coolest systems out there.

[–] Justas 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lithuanian is the closest living language to Proto-Indo-European, and has a lot of cognates with Sanskrit.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Baltic languages are awesome. I only wish I could master those case systems!

[–] Justas 1 points 1 year ago

There are two ways to learn them, you can try memorising a bunch of tables or learn with a lot of direct practice. Probably a bit of both. I am a native speaker of Lithuanian but I don't even remember the cases, to be honest.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Interesting, I assumed most East Asian languages were originally formed from Chinese.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Chinese did influence a lot of east Asian languages, but it's more like the relationship between Latin and English - lots of borrowing and influence, but it's not an ancestor.